World Television Signal Guide

WORLD TELEVISION SIGNAL GUIDE
The table below lists broadcast standards by country.

There are three main television standards used throughout the world. NTSC - National Television Standards Committee Developed in the US and first used in 1954, NTSC is the oldest existing broadcast standard. It consists of 525 horizontal lines of display and 60 vertical lines. Only one type exists, known as NTSC M. It is sometimes irreverently referred to as "Never Twice the Same Color." SECAM - Systme lectronique pour Couleur avec Mmoire. Developed in France and first used in 1967. It uses a 625-line vertical, 50-line horizontal display. Different types use different video bandwidth and audio carrier specifications. Types B and D are usually used for VHF. Types G, H, and K are used for UHF. Types I, N, M, K1 and L are used for both VHF and UHF. These different types are generally not compatible with one another. SECAM is sometimes irreverently referred to as "Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method" or "SEcond Color Always Magenta." PAL - Phase Alternating Line Developed in Germany and first used in 1967. A variant of NTSC, PAL uses a 625/50-line display. Different types use different video bandwidth and audio carrier specifications. Common types are B, G, and H. Less common types include D, I, K, N, and M. These different types are generally not compatible with one another. Proponents of PAL irreverently call it "Perfection At Last," while critics of its enormous circuit complexity call it "Pay A Lot" or "Picture Always Lousy."
Television Standards by Country

Country
Afghanistan Albania Algeria Angola Antarctica Antigua & Barbuda Argentina
Signal Type
PAL B, SECAM B PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL I NTSC M NTSC M
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PAL N
Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Azores Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belgium (Armed Forces Network) Belize Benin Bermuda Bolivia Bosnia/Herzegovina Botswana Brazil British Indian Ocean Territory Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada
SECAM D/K NTSC M PAL B/G PAL B/G SECAM D/K PAL B NTSC M PAL B/G PAL B NTSC M SECAM D/K PAL B/H NTSC M NTSC M SECAM K NTSC M NTSC M PAL B/H SECAM K, PAL I PAL M NTSC M PAL B PAL SECAM K SECAM K PAL B/G, NTSC M PAL B/G
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NTSC M
Canary Islands Central African Republic Chad Chile China (People'S Republic) Colombia Congo (People'S Republic) Congo, Dem. Rep. (Zaire) Cook Islands Costa Rica Cote D'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Diego Garcia Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic East Timor Easter Island Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equitorial Guinea Estonia Ethiopia
PAL B/G SECAM K SECAM D NTSC M PAL D NTSC M SECAM K SECAM K PAL B NTSC M SECAM K/D PAL B/H NTSC M PAL B/G PAL B/G (cable), PAL D/K (broadcast) PAL B/G NTSC M SECAM K NTSC M NTSC M PAL B PAL B NTSC M PAL B/G, SECAM B/G NTSC M SECAM B PAL B/G
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PAL B
Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas) Fiji Finland France France (French Forces Tv) Gabon Galapagos Islands Gambia Georgia Germany Germany (Armed Forces Tv Germany) Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guam Guadeloupe Guatemala Guiana (French) Guinea Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India
PAL I NTSC M PAL B/G SECAM L SECAM G SECAM K NTSC M PAL B SECAM D/K PAL B/G NTSC M PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL B NTSC M NTSC M SECAM K NTSC M SECAM K PAL K NTSC M SECAM NTSC M PAL I PAL K/K PAL B/G
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PAL B
Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland, Republic Of Isle Of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Johnstone Island Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Korea (North) Korea (South) Kuwait Kyrgyz Republic Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia
PAL B PAL B/G PAL PAL I PAL PAL B/G PAL B/G NTSC M NTSC M NTSC M PAL B/G SECAM D/K PAL B/G SECAM D, PAL D/K NTSC M PAL B/G SECAM D/K PAL B PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL K PAL B/H PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL B/G, SECAM D/K PAL B/G, SECAM L PAL I
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PAL B/H
Madagascar Madeira Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Mexico Micronesia Midway Island Moldova (Moldavia) Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar (Burma) Namibia Nepal Netherlands Netherlands (Armed Forces Network) Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia
SECAM K PAL B PAL B PAL B SECAM K PAL B NTSC M SECAM K SECAM B SECAM B SECAM K NTSC M NTSC M NTSC M SECAM D/K SECAM L, PAL G SECAM D PAL B/G NTSC M SECAM B PAL B NTSC M PAL I B PAL B/G NTSC M NTSC M
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SECAM K
New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Norfolk Island North Mariana Islands Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Polynesia (French) Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Reunion Romania Russia St. Kitts & Nevis St. Lucia St. Pierre Et Miquelon St. Vincent Sao Tom E Principe
PAL B/G NTSC M SECAM K PAL B/G PAL B NTSC M PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL B NTSC M NTSC M PAL B/G PAL N NTSC M NTSC M PAL D/K SECAM K PAL B/G NTSC M PAL B SECAM K PAL D/G SECAM D/K NTSC M NTSC M SECAM K NTSC M
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PAL B/G
Samoa, American Saudi Arabia Samoa Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Somalia South Africa Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syria Tahiti Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Togo Trinidad & Tobago Tunisia
NTSC SECAM B/G, PAL B NTSC M SECAM K PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL B/H PAL B/G PAL I PAL B/G PAL PAL B NTSC M PAL B/G PAL B/G PAL B/G (GERMAN ZONE, SECAM L (FRENCH ZONE SECAM B, PAL G SECAM NTSC SECAM D/K PAL B PAL B/M SECAM K NTSC M
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SECAM B/G
Turkey Turkmenistan Turks & Caicos Islands Uganda Ukraine Uruguay United Arab Emirates United States United Kingdom Uzbekistan Venezuela Vietnam Virgin Islands (Us & British) Wallis & Futuna Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe
PAL B SECAM D/K NTSC M PAL B/G SECAM D/K PAL N PAL B/G NTSC M PAL I SECAM D/K NTSC M NTSC M, SECAM D NTSC M SECAM K PAL B/NTSC M PAL B/G PAL B/G
If you would like more information on international video and television standards, the excellent site at http://www.ee.surrey. ac.uk/Contrib/WorldTV/ is highly recommended.
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Why Do Different TV Standards Exist?
Section Headings

Eh? Why Did This Happen? Compounding The Problem It Gets Worse... ... And That's Not All
Eh?
Not all the worlds TV receivers work in the same way.
Different countries use different types of broadcast TV system, most of which are to varying extents incompatible with each other. Unfortunately, video recordings retain many of the characteristics of the original signal of which they are a recording. In general, recordings are more likely to be compatible than recieving equipment, but only with their own "family".
Why Did This Happen?
In order to work TV receivers require a source of field timing reference signals. These are signals that tell the TV receiver to be ready to receive the next picture in the stream of images. Early set designers decided to use the Mains power supply frequency as this source for two good reasons. The first was that with the older types of power supply, you would get rolling hum bars on the TV picture if the mains supply and power source were not at exactly the same frequency. The second was that the TV studios would have had enormous problems with flicker on their cameras when making programmes.
There are two Mains power frequencies widely used arround the World, 50Hz and 60Hz. This immediately divided the worlds TV systems into two distinct camps, the 25 frames per second camp (50Hz) and the 30 frames per second camp (60Hz). Later the 60Hz camp made a small adjustment and changed the field rate to 59.94Hz when they added colour to the signals. The issue of field frequency remained sufficently deep rooted in both TV standards that the vested interest remained long after the original technical justification had gone.
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The biggest compatibility problems between TV standards remain related to the field rate; these are also the hardest problems to solve.
Compounding The Problem
Beyond the initial divide between 50 and 60Hz based systems, further sub-divisions have appeared within both camps since the inception of Colour broadcasting. The majority of 60Hz based countries use a technique known as NTSC originally developed in the United States by a committee called the National Television Standards Committee. NTSC (often scurrilously refered to as Never Twice the Same Colour) works perfectly in a video or closed ciruit environment but can exhibit problems of varying hue when used in a broadcast environment.
This hue change problem is caused by shifts in the colour sub-carrier phase of the signal. A modified version of NTSC soon appeared which differed mainly in that the sub-carrier phase was reversed on each second line; this is known as PAL, standing for Phase Alternate Lines (it has a wide range of facetious acronyms including Pictures At Last, Pay for Added Luxury (re: cost of delay line), and People Are Lavendar). PAL has been adopted by a few 60Hz countries, most notably Brazil. Amongst the countries based on 50Hz systems, PAL has been the most widely adopted. PAL is not the only colour system in widespread use with 50Hz; the French designed a system of their own - primarily for political reasons to protect their domestic manufacturing companies - which is known as SECAM, standing for SEquential Couleur Avec Memoire. The most common facetious acronym is System Essentially Contrary to American Method, SECAM was widely adopted in Eastern Block countries to encourage incompatibility with Western transmissions again a political motive. In general, since the field and scan rates are identical, you can expect to get a monochrome picture from a PAL video recording replayed on SECAM equipment, and vice versa. Transmission frequencies and encoding differences make equipment incompatible from a broadcast viewpoint. Transcoders between PAL and SECAM, while often difficult to find, are reasonably cheap. In Europe, a few Direct Satelite Broadcasting services use a system called D-MAC. It's use is not wide-spread at present and it is transcoded to PAL or SECAM to permit video recording of it's signals. It includes features for 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratio transmissions and an eventual migration path to Europe's proposed HDTV standard. There are other MAC-based standards in use around the world including B-MAC in Australia and B-MAC60 on some private networks in the USA. There is also a second European varient called D2-MAC which supports additional audio channels making transmitted signals incompatible, but not baseband signals.
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It Gets Worse...
In addition to the incompatibilities of 50 and 60Hz systems, and the different Colour systems, there is a further barrier to compatibility. Fortunately, video recordings themselves are not affected by this, only the TV signal reception equipment. For various reasons of number of stations and terrain, TV pictures can be transmitted in any of three main frequency ranges, VHF, UHF and Microwave (Satelite Direct Broadcasting). Equipment designed to receive signals in only one of these bands cannot receive transmissions in any of the other bands.
Further, there are differences between the encoding of the sound between countries using the same frequency bands. Within 50Hz PAL UHF transmissions, audio signals can be at 5.5Mhz offset (system G), or at 6MHz offset (system I). Similar differences exist between the Middle Eastern versions of SECAM (MESECAM) and the Eastern Bloc (OIRT) version.
... And That's Not All
In addition to standard combinations of Scan Rate, Colour System and transmission frequencies, there are further complications when it comes to additional features like Stereo Sound, Sub-titling and information services. Fortunately, such differences do not effect the basic operation of equipment conforming to the same broadcast standard, but they can restrict the use of various features.
In the cases of both stereo sound and additional textural information carried in the top few lines of the picture, there are three competing systems of varying technical merit. The oldest still operational of the stereo sound systems is the American MTS system based on NTSC transmissions, only slightly more recent is the twin channel FM-FM system used in Germany, Austrua, Australia, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The most recent system, NICAM 728, was designed by the BBC in the late 1980s using digital audio technology. The oldest of the subtitling systems is almost definately the BBC and IBA designed TeleText system which has been is use in the UK since the mid 1970s. It is also the most widespread and the most flexible of the systems in widespread use. The US Closed Captioning mechanism came about through political pressure from the Deaf organisations in the USA and has not been developed beyond the simple job of producing subtitles for the Deaf. The French developed a subtitling and information system called Antiope which has not found favour elsewhere, largely due to the existing widespread use of the BBC developed TeleText system. A few US stations have now adopted the BBC-style Teletext and a few manufacturers, most notably Zenith, fit the decoders to their sets.
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TV Systems: A Comparison
Section Headings

TV Picture Format/Colour System Combinations The Relative Merits of TV Systems o NTSC - Pros and Cons o PAL - Pros and Cons o SECAM - Pros and Cons
TV Picture Format/Colour System Combinations

The Main Video Signal Standards Frame/Field rate Aspect Ratio Name TV standard 29.97/59.94 NTSC EIA 29.97/59.94 PAL-M EIA 29.97/59.94 SECAM-M EIA 25/50 PAL CCIR SECAM 25/50 PAL 4:3 4.43MHz SECAM 4:3 ?.??MHz 625 PAL 4:3 3.58MHz 525 NTSC 4:3 3.58MHz 525 Colour System Subcarrier Freq 4:3 525 Scan Lines
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625
CCIR 25/50 D-MAC D-MAC 25/50 PALplus CCIR 60/120 HiVision HiVision
SECAM 4:3 or 16:9 D-MAC 16:9 PAL 16:9 MUSE
4.25/4.40MHz 625 N/A 625 4.43MHz 1125 Unknown
The Relative Merits of TV Systems

The differences between each of the main TV systems are not quite as clear cut as one might at first imagine. While NTSC has a reputation for poor colour accuracy, this is only really true of broadcast television and as a video format it has some distinct advantages over the other systems. All these systems are a compromise and many efforts have been made over the years to address the shortcomings in each of the systems.
In the section below, I have tried to create as objective as possible a comparison of these various pros and cons. The techniques that are used to overcome these limitations are discussed elsewhere.
NTSC/525 Advantages

Higher Frame Rate - Use of 30 frames per second (really 29.97) reduces visible flicker. Atomic Colour Edits - With NTSC it is possible to edit at any 4 field boundary point without disturbing the colour signal. Less inherent picture noise - Almost all pieces of video equipment achieve better signal to noise characteristics in their NTSC/525 form than in their PAL/625.
NTSC/525 Disadvantages
Lower Number of Scan Lines - Reduced clarity on large screen TVs, line structure more visible. 14
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Smaller Luminance Signal Bandwidth - Due to the placing of the colour sub-carrier at 3.58MHz, picture defects such as moire, cross-colour, and dot interference become more pronounced. This is because of the greater likelihood of interaction with the monochrome picture signal at the lower sub-carrier frequency. Susceptablity to Hue Fluctuation - Variations in the colour subcarrier phase cause shifts in the displayed colour, requiring that the TV receivers be equiped with a Hue adjustment to compensate. Lower Gamma Ratio - The gamma value for NTSC/525 is set at 2.2 as opposed to the slightly higher 2.8 defined for PAL/625. This means that PAL/625 can produce pictures of greater contrast. Undesirable Automatic Features - Many NTSC TV receivers feature an Auto-Tint circuit to make hue fluctuations less visible to uncritical viewers. This circuit changes all colours approximating to flesh tone into a "standard" fleshtone, thus hiding the effects of hue fluctuation. This does mean however that a certain range of colour shades cannot be displayed correctly by these sets. Up-market models often have this (mis)feature switchable, cheaper sets do not.
PAL/625 Advantages

Greater Number of Scan Lines - more picture detail. Wider Luminance Signal Bandwidth - The placing of the colour Sub-Carrier at 4.43MHz allows a larger bandwidth of monochrome information to be reproduced than with NTSC/525. Stable Hues - Due to reversal of sub-carrier phase on alternate lines, any phase error will be corrected by an equal and oposite error on the next line, correcting the original error. In early PAL implementations it was left to the low resolution of the human eye's colour abilities to provide the averaging effect; it is now done with a delay line. Higher Gamma Ratio - The gamma value for PAL/625 is set at 2.8 as opposed to the lower 2.2 figure of NTSC/525. This permits a higher level of contrast than on NTSC/525 signals. This is particularly noticable when using multi-standard equipment as the contrast and brightness settings need to be changed to give a similar look to signals of the two formats.
PAL/625 Disadvantages

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More Flicker - Due to the lower frame rate, flicker is more noticable on PAL/625 transmissions; particularly so for people used to viewing NTSC/525 signals. Lower Signal to Noise Ratio - The higher bandwidth requirements cause PAL/625 equipment to have slightly worse signal to noise performance than it's equivalent NTSC/525 version. Loss of Colour Editing Accuracy - Due to the alternation of the phase of the colour signal, the phase and the colour signal only reach a common point once every 8 fields/4 frames. This means that edits can only be performed to an accuracy of +/- 4 frames (8 fields). Variable Colour Saturation - Since PAL achieves accurate colour through cancelling out phase differences between the two signals, the act of cancelling out errors can reduce the colour saturation while holding the hue stable. Fortunately, the human eye is far less sensitive to saturation variations than to hue variations, so this is very much the lesser of two evils.
SECAM/625 Advantages

Stable Hues and Constant Saturation - SECAM shares with PAL the ability to render images with the correct hue, and goes a step further in ensuring consistant saturation of colour as well. Higher Number of Scan Lines - SECAM shares with PAL/625, the higher number of scan lines than NTSC/525.
SECAM/625 Disadvantages

Greater Flicker - (See PAL/625) Mixing of two synchronous SECAM colour signals is not possible - Most TV studios in SECAM countries originate in PAL and transcode prior to broadcasting. More advanced home systems such as SuperVHS, Hi-8, and LaserDisc work internally in PAL and transcode on replay in SECAM market models. Patterning Effects - The FM subcarrier causes patterning effects even on non-coloured objects. Lower monochrome Bandwidth - Due to one of the two colour sub-carriers being at 4.25MHz (in the French Version), a lower bandwith of monochrome signal can be carried. Incompatibility between different versions of SECAM - SECAM being at least partially politically inspired, has a wide range of variants, many of which are incompatible with each other. For example between French SECAM with uses FM subcarrier, and MESECAM which uses an AM subcarrier.
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Broadcasting System Details
Section Headings

Technical Specifications Additional Features o Stereo Sound o Subtitling Colour and Broadcasting Systems by Country
Technical Specifications
Scan Code Frames Lines Band Offset Modulation Freq Sound Vision In Use
Terrestrial Transmission Standards A B C D E F G H I 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 405 625 625 625 819 819 625 625 625 VHF VHF VHF VHF VHF VHF UHF UHF UHF -3.5MHz Pos No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes
+5.5MHz Neg +5.5MHz Pos +6.5MHz Neg +11MHz Neg
+5.5MHz Pos +5.5MHz Neg +5.5MHz Neg +6.0MHz Neg
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K KI L M N
25 25 25
625 625 625
UHF UHF UHF
+6.5MHz Neg +6.5MHz Neg +6.5MHz Pos
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
30 (29.97) 525 25 625
VHF/UHF +4.5MHz Neg VHF/UHF +4.5MHz Neg
Satellite Transmission Standards Ku-Band Any C-Band Any Any ~11GHz +6.50MHz Neg Any ~4GHz +6.50MHz Pos Yes Yes
Additional Features
Stereo Sound
MTS - Used in conjunction with NTSC/525. Consists of two independant carriers each carrying a discrete channel. One channel provides stereo sound by providing left/right channel difference signals relative to transmitted mono audio track. The second carrier carries the Secondary Audio Program (SAP) which is used for a second language or a descriptive commentary for the blind. Uses a technique based on the dbx noise reduction to improve the frequency response of the audio channel. FM-FM - dual carrier FM coded discrete stereo transmissions, analogue. Can be used for bilingual operation under user selection, but no auto-selection is available. Audio characteristics better than standard mono soundtrack. NICAM - (full name: NICAM 728) Digital two-channel audio transmissions with sub-code selection of bi-lingual operation. Stereo digital signals with specifications approaching those of Compact Disc are possible. NICAM stands for Near Instantaneously Companded Audio Multiplex and uses a 14bit sample at a 32KHz sampling rate which produces a data stream of 728KBits/sec.
CC - (full name: Closed Captioning) Transmitted on line 21 of NTSC/525 transmissions, contains subtitling information only. CC has no support for block graphics or multiple pages but it can 18
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Subtitling
support 8-colours and the use of an italic typeface. Frequently found on pre-recorded VHS cassettes and LDs, also used on broadcast. Also found on PAL/625 pre-recorded VHS cassettes in a modified version. TeleText - An information service of 200-700 "pages" covering a wide range of topics including TV Schedules, News, Financial Market prices, Comment, Reviews, Concert & Theatre information. Subtitles are typically transmitted on page 888 in the UK, on pages 199/299/399 in Belgium and Holland, on page 150 in Germany and on page 777 in Italy. There are a number of variant character sets used, but the encoding is identical and all English alphabet characters plus numbers and most punctuation can be handled by any decoder. Includes support for 8 colours, and limited block graphics, and selective revealing of underlying TV picture. Transmitted on a variable number of lines (specified in header which contains basic information such as time, date and channel), starting on line 12 and continuing for 7-8 lines typically. Found on broadcasts and some LaserDiscs; recording of TeleText signals is marginal on S-VHS, almost impossible on VHS hence the PAL/625 version of CC.
The BBC-designed Teletext system is known in some quarters as World Standard Teletext. There is an enhanced version known as Fastext which defines four links to additional pages that can be followed with one of four coloured buttons on the Teletext receivers remote control. The U.S. "CC" is known widely in technical circles as LITO = LIne Twenty-One! where it lives.
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Video Formats
Section Headings

Additional TV systems used solely in Video Video Formats - Availability by TV System Comparing Video Tape Lengths Digital Video Formats
Additional TV systems used solely in Video

In addition to the basic TV systems, there are a number of additional hybrid formats which are to be found only in video equipment. These are usually a hybrid signal used to provide compatibility with video material of another TV format without a complete translation. Many of these signals are not symetric in that they cannot be recorded by video recorders that can play them. Frame/Field Scan Colour Sub-carrier Name Rate NTSC 4.43 Lines Systems Freq. 4.43MHz 4.43MHz 3.58MHz
29.97/59.94 525 NTSC
Pseudo-PAL 29.97/59.94 525 PAL Pseudo-NTSC 25/50 625 NTSC
Video Formats - Availability by TV System

For a range of reasons, some of them historical and some of them technical, the main video formats aren't the same in each colour system. There are actually some very dramatic differences in both the availability and maximum running times between the main TV standards. A much more detailed table of video formats including the professional ones is also available - this also includes more technical information on each format. The table below summarises these: 20
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Scan Lines Format /Colour SP 525/NTSC LP EP VHS 625/PAL LP SP 625/SECAM LP SP 525/NTSC EP SuperVHS SP 625/PAL LP D-VHS 525/NTSC N/A miniDV 525/NTSC DVC DVC miniDV 625/PAL DVC SP Video 8 525/NTSC LP SP Speed
Max Playing Time/Tape 160 mins/T-160 320 mins/T-160 480 mins/T-160 300 mins/E-300 600 mins/E-300 300 mins/E-300 600 mins/E-300 160 mins/ST-160 480 mins/ST-160 240 mins/SE-240 480 mins/SE-240 Varies 60 mins 180 mins 60 mins 180 mins 120 mins/P6-120
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240 mins/P6-120
SP 625/PAL LP SP 625/SECAM LP SP 525/NTSC LP Hi-8 SP 625/PAL LP CAV 525/NTSC CLV LaserDisc CAV 625/PAL CLV
90 mins/P5-90 180 mins/P5-90 90 mins/P5-90 180 mins/P5-90 120 mins/P6-120ME 240 mins/P6-120ME 90 mins/P5-90ME 180 mins/P5-90ME 30 mins per side 60 mins per side 37 mins per side 72 mins per side
Single Layer Varies (4.7GB) 525/NTSC Dual Layer Varies (8.6GB) DVD Single Layer Varies (4.7GB) 625/NTSC Dual Layer Varies (8.6GB)
Notes:
SECAM SuperVHS, Hi-8 and LaserDisc are all recorded on tape/disc as PAL signals and are converted to SECAM on playback by those machines sold in SECAM markets.
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Comparing Video Tape Lengths

The differences between the running speed of VCRs of the same format in different colour systems has led to some very confusing naming of video tape lengths. Beta is unique in having named the tape after the length rather than it prospective running time, thus making it free of the problems that beset other formats. In the table below, we compare the actual lengths of some standard tape types. Running time Name TV system Actual Length Own System Other System SuperVHS/VHS ST/T-120 NTSC/525 250 metres SE/E-180 PAL/625 258 metres 120 mins 180 mins 175 mins 126 mins
Hi-8/Video 8 P6-120 NTSC/525 112 metres P5-90 PAL/625 112 metres 120 mins 90 mins 90 mins 120 mins
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Building Bridges Between The Standards
Section Headings

Overview Transcoding - Pseudo-PAL and Pseudo-NTSC Multi Standard Equipment Standards Conversion
Overview
There are three main approaches to bridging the gaps between the world's many video standards.
The first of these is what I loosely refer to as transcoding. This applies primarily to efforts to replay material from other TV systems using equipment designed with a single particular TV system in mind. Almost all of the solutions based on this technique are replay only and make no provision for the production of material in the foreign tv system. The second approach is that of the true multi-standard equipment. These are pieces of video equipment that can work as fully operational pieces of equipment in any one of a number of TV systems. With a multi-standard video recorder, you expect an NTSC tape to be reproduced as a standard NTSC signal, and the same machine if fed with a PAL tape will reproduce it as a standard PAL signal. A multi-standard VCR can also be expected to make a perfectly normal NTSC recording of an NTSC input signal, and a perfectly normal PAL recording of a PAL input signal. The third approach is that of standards conversion where the TV signal is actually converted from being a standard signal in one TV system to being a standard signal in another. This is the only way in which material can be sent from one TV system to another with an absolute garentee of working, and where operations such as recording and copying become possible in the destination TV system. Transcoding - Pseudo-PAL and Pseudo-NTSC
In this section, we'll look solely at compatibility between NTSC and PAL because that is by far the most common and most difficult of the TV standards barriers to cross. Transcoding is also the newest technique, having only really entered the arena in 1988 with the lauch of the Panasonic NV-L28 VHS VCR. 24
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In the early days of television when everything was locked to mains frequency, it was next to impossible to get a TV to accept a signal with even the smallest instability. With the advent of switch mode power supplies and VCRs, there came both the ability and the need to decouple the field timing reference from the mains frequency. The reason for this was that the nature of video recording creates relatively unstable tv signals on replay, and as a result the TV has to follow the fluctuations and variations of the signal in order to reproduce the picture. The down side is that the field timing reference signal now has to be generated by dividing down the ticks from a quartz crystal, something that requires an increased component count in the TV receiver. As time went by TV manufacturers tried to reduce the number of components by producing a dedicated VLSI chipset which did all the work. The majority of designs for these were actually implemented as a single chipset for the world, which would support either 525/60 or 625/50 pictures. It so happens that TV sets based upon such a chipset can actually produce a very acceptable monochrome picture of the other TV system when feed with such a video signal. The chipset will automatically adjust the number of lines in the picture to match those of the incoming signal. Since PAL and NTSC are not that different in the way they encode colour signals, it's not actually that difficult to modify the signal to achieve a reasonable colour reproduction at the same time. The net effect is that you end up with a signal that has the frame rate/ scan line characteristics of the original TV system, but the colour coding and subcarier characteristics of the local TV system. This hybrid cannot be recorded but does provide a very effective way of painting over the cracks and allowing the reproduction of material in the other TV system.
Multi Standard Equipment

The second way of bridging the gap between the various TV systems is to use true multi-standard equipment. Multi-standard equipment refers to TVs, VCRs, and LaserDisc players that can genuinely work in a number of different TV systems. These machines will typically have switches and indicators to show which TV system they are working in, and when a given TV system has been selected will work exactly the same as a standard single machine in the same system would.
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If for example, you had a multi-standard VCR which supported NTSC and PAL, you could record the playback signal of an NTSC camcorder and make a genuine NTSC copy, or record an off-air PAL broadcast and make a genuine PAL VHS recording. What you could not do is to perform any kind of conversion; the VCR changes it's TV system personality rather than making any change to the signal. Any signal that is NTSC 525/60 will remain that way, and any signal that is PAL 625/50 will remain PAL 625/50. In order to make effective use of a multi-standard VCR, you will need either a multi-standard TV to display on, or a TV of each TV system you want to watch (as a general rule).
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Multi-standard VCRs are not amongst the easiest things to find since they are not a mass-market item. Although most of the major VCR manufacturers do make them, surprisingly few actually distribute them on a world wide basis. As a result, other than in export markets such as those of countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong, they can only be found at a few specialist dealers and then often only as grey imports. The best advice would normally be to look for adverts in the back of a local video magasine, for example Video in the USA or What Video in the UK and parts of Europe. While machines in the transcoding category (see above) are only available in a few major colour systems, there will be a multi- standard VCR for every country in the world. This does not mean that all multi-standard VCRs support all the world's TV systems, although some do. There are a number of multi-standard machines that support only the various 625/50 systems such as PAL/SECAM/MESECAM in use in eastern Europe and the Middle East. There are others that support PAL and NTSC but not SECAM, or maybe only certain versions of SECAM (usually MESECAM). Further complexities are added when you consider the capabilities of the TV tuners and RF adaptors of these machines, many of these support less combinations than the VCR itself can handle as video signals. A common example of this is the French SECAM-L; many multi-standard VCRs can handle this only through the video inputs and outputs, not through the Tuner and RF adaptor. To make a recording of French TV with one of these, you would need to attach it to the video outputs of a French TV and select the TV's tuner to the channel you want to record - not a lot of use if you want to do a timer recording. In addition to being cautious and making sure that the multi-standard machine supports the TV systems you need, you also need to check for more advanced features, particularly stereo sound systems. Although there are a few exceptions, most stereo (VHS HiFi) multi-standard video recorders can only actually receive stereo broadcasts using one of the techniques, be it NICAM, MTS or FM-FM. In countries using the other systems, you will only be able to receive the mono TV soundtrack with these machines. Finally, multi-standard machines tend to be fairly basic. Most manufacturers only offer about two models; typically one with only mono sound and one with VHS HiFi sound. Fancy extras like flying erase heads, manual audio record level controls, edit connections, and SuperVHS operation are not available. Neither are multi-standard camcorders. Actually, the last one - the camcorder, seems a bit of a surprise since it is camcorder footage that most often leads people into the morass that is TV system incompatibility in the first place. To be able to buy a camcorder that can record in PAL if you know you're going to send it to relatives in a PAL country, and NTSC if you're going to use it say in the USA would seem quite attractive to many people.
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Standards Conversion
Standards Conversion is the most complex, technically difficult and degrading of all of the techniques for building bridges between TV standards. It is also the most desirable since the material actually becomes a genuine signal of the destination TV system, which can be recorded and reproduced by equipment of the destination TV system.
Conversion between TV systems with same frame rate are usually reasonably effective, except of course that the resultant signal usually suffers from the deficencies of both the source and destination colour system. Conversion between TV systems with differing frame rates is extremely difficult and there is no perfect solution. With a trained eye, it is possible to spot that any given piece of material has been standards converted within a matter of seconds. The units that perform these conversions are known as Digital Standards Converters. For many years digital standards converters were very expensive indeed and as a result were only used by TV stations and video facilities houses. This all changed in the 1990 with the launch by Panasonic of the NV-W1, a combination VHS deck/digital standards converter at around UK#1,600 (approx US$2300). Since then other manufacturers have also introduced domestic standards converters at even lower prices. Among the manufacturers with standards converters in their range are Panasonic, Aiwa, Sharp, and Samsung. Professional standards converters also exist, many of which can achieve significantly better results, but at a price. One of the best is the DEFT, which costs a cool UK#65,000 (approx US$100,000)!
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Standards Conversion
Section Headings

The Basic Approach Coping with Movement Scanline Artifacts
The Basic Approach

The most fundamental problem when attempting to convert from PAL/625 to NTSC/525 and vice versa is the difference in frame rate. With NTSC/525 fitting 30 frames into a second, and PAL/625 only having 25 frames in the same time period, the frames will only start in the same place in the signal on (at best) five occasions within each second.
The only way to effectively perform such a conversion is to be able to freeze a frame and hold it until it's the right time for it to start in the other TV system. The only viable way to hold such a large lump of signal electronically is to digitise it and store into a large block of fast computer memory. This is exactly what a digital standards converter does, with the picture quality of the converter governed by the amount of memory used and the resolution of the digitisation process.
Coping With Movement

The biggest single problem to contend with when doing standards conversion is that of making the motion in the finished image look as smooth as possible. This is an extremely difficult thing to do and there is still no really effective solution to this problem, leading to the purist view that
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material should always be watched in the TV format it was originally made in. Usually this is only possible for people with multi-standard high end equipment such as multi-standard LaserDisc players and who are prepared to import large amounts of material from other contries.
The diagram above illustrates some of the solutions to the problem. The simplest solution is shown in Method A, and is the method used by the majority of domestic TV standards converters such as the Panasonic W1, Awia HX-M1, etc. The next solution (Method B), namely to mix two adjacent images together to create the in-between frame where needed, is used by many industrial converters and some of the high end domestic standards converters such as the Sharp AN-300SC. The final solution (Method C) with motion tracking involves storing a sequence of frames for processing and extremely fast microprocessors to try and analyze the motion. This is hugely expensive by comparison with the other techniques with standards convertors featuring this technology costing a mimimum of around US$25,000.
Even the most advanced standards converters have their problems. While they can usually find any pronounced "edges" in the moving image and predict where it would be half way between the two images; the more indistinct the motion the more likely it will fail to predict the position correctly. With extreme motion such as sporting events, these converters can even sometimes fail to track the object at all. For example, a gymnast's legs can disappear during motion because there is no way of tracking the vectors of the motion between images taken 1/25th of a second appart.
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Scanline artifacts
As ever, the problems don't end there. As well as the problem of dealing with motion, there is also the quest for fine detail in the image. This in itself presents a problem since the differing line structure of NTSC/525 and PAL/625 means that each line of the image is out of proportion in reference to it's neighbour in the other system.
The simpler standards converters merely drop or repeat every fifth line or so in the output picture, resulting in some slightly strange effects particularly on text, but retaining much of the definition. The median approach is to mix the appropriate lines together, often on a proportional basis, as illustrated in the diagram. The extreme top end approach is to try and detect edges of objects within each scan line by areas of rapid transistion and to predict where the exact position would be based upon the position of the edge in the scan line above and the scan line below. This area in particular is made much worse by the two field to a frame interlace used by all the world's TV systems. The idea is that to keep the flicker of the screen down, each TV frame is drawn onto the screen in two halfs. The first trip down all the odd-numbered lines of the TV picture are drawn, the second time down the even-numbered lines are drawn. This means that a low end converter with only a field store will only be able to do comparisions between adjacent lines from the field, rather than adjacent lines from the full frame. This means that the lines being compared will in fact have a missing (even if the pair are odd) line that should have gone between them.
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Digital Television
Section Headings

The Fundamental Basis SDTV HDTV
The Fundamental Basis

Digital Television systems are now being deployed in various parts of the world, but unfortunately they are even more diversified and different than the old analogue systems. They do have some things in common. Almost all are based on the MPEG-2 (Motion Picture Experts Group) high compression video encoding system. This system is also used on DVDs and some web streaming video applications. Sometimes the picture quality achieveable with MPEG-2 can be absolutely astounding; much of the time bandwidth and related financial constraints result in some truely appalling artifacts.
The majority of broadcast TV applications, known as DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting), use MPEG-2 at lower quality levels or "bit rates". These bit rates are expressed in megabits per second or Mb/sec - Note that the b is lower case - MB/sec would mean megaBYTES per second which would be a wholely different measurment. DVDs typically use bitrates of between 2 Mb/sec and 10 Mb/sec (the maximum allowed). Some digital TV applications fall below even 2 Mb/sec, unfortunately. Further the process of encoding video into MPEG-2 for broadcast/DVD is a technically complex proceedure. The majority of DVDs are encoded "non-real-time", in other words they are analysed by a computer frame by frame over the course of several hours before the final result is available. This results in a much better quality picture at a lower bitrate than could be achieved if the MPEG-2 encoding has been done "in real time". Unfortunately most DVB systems do not use any material already coded into MPEG-2 (from the DVD master for instance) - most are coded "on the fly" in real time. This again makes for inferior results. DVB systems also use the slightly inferior 4:2:0 method of colour encoding (in common with DVD), although there is a variant of MPEG-2 for broadcast use that uses the industry standard 4:2:2 method of coding. This encoding method reduces the amount of detail in the colour information part of the picture. Many of the worlds DVB systems also include some form of scrambling technology to allow for subscription and pay-per-view broadcasting, and these again differ between various countries, territories and suppliers. Others also include facilities for Interactive Television which tries them to running a specific "environment" on which the computer code for these services runs.
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SDTV
The term SDTV (Standard Definition Television) refers to the use of a digital broadcast to carry TV pictures of the same physical parameters as today's existing systems. These are interlaced signals (ie each frame is divided into two fields) and the only new feature they add over existing analogue TV distribution from a picture viewpoint is automatic support for both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio operation.
Standard Dimensions 525 line systems 480x720 625 line systems 576x720
7.3 ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee)
At present, the standardized digital formats subdivided in SDTV and HDTV are represented in tab. 3:
ATSC formats horizontal pixels
1920
format
vertical scan lines

1080 *
aspect ratio
16:9
scan mode
frame rate
1080p
progressive
23.976 Hz
1080p
1920
1080 *
16:9
progressive
24 Hz
1080p
1920
1080 *
16:9
progressive
29.97 Hz
1080p
1920
1080 *
16:9
progressive
30 Hz
1080i
1920
1080 *
16:9
interlaced
29.97 Hz
HDTV
1080i
1920
1080 *
16:9
interlaced
30 Hz
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
23.976 Hz
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
24 Hz
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
29.97 Hz
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720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
59.94 Hz
32
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
30 Hz
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
60 Hz
480p
704
480
16:9
progressive
23.976 Hz
480p
704
480
16:9
progressive
24 Hz
480p
704
480
16:9
progressive
29.97 Hz
480p
704
480
16:9
progressive
30 Hz
480p
704
480
16:9
progressive
59.94 Hz
480p
704
480
16:9
progressive
60 Hz
480i
704
480
16:9
interlaced
29.97 Hz
480i
704
480
16:9
interlaced
30 Hz
480p
704
480
4:3
progressive
23.976 Hz
480p
704
480
4:3
progressive
24 Hz
SDTV
480p
704
480
4:3
progressive
29.97 Hz
480p
704
480
4:3
progressive
30 Hz
480p
704
480
4:3
progressive
59.94 Hz
480p
704
480
4:3
progressive
60 Hz
480i
704
480
4:3
interlaced
29.97 Hz
480i
704
480
4:3
interlaced
30 Hz
480p
640
480
4:3
progressive
23.976 Hz
480p
640
480
4:3
progressive
24 Hz
480p
640
480
4:3
progressive
29.97 Hz
480p
640
480
4:3
progressive
30 Hz
480p
640
480
4:3
progressive
59.94 Hz
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480p
640
480
4:3
progressive
60 Hz
480i
640
480
4:3
interlaced
29.97 Hz
480i
640
480
4:3
interlaced
30 Hz
Table 3: Standardized ATSC formats (USA)
* Considering these formats it should be mentionend that in reality 1088 lines are encoded in order to be sufficient for the MPEG-2 standard. The encoded vertical height must be divisible by 16 (progressive scan mode) or 32 (interlaced scan mode). The lowest 8 lines are black due to the MPEG standards.
Consider the complete overview of countries using ATSC.
7.4 DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting)
The DVB formats with MPEG-2 screen resolution standardized by EBU (European Broadcasting Union) and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in these days are subdivided into HDTV, SDTV and LDTV in tab. 4:
DVB formats (MPEG-2 screen resolution) horizontal pixels
1440
format
vertical scan lines

1152
aspect ratio
16:9
scan mode
frame rate (Hz)

25
1152i(2)
interlaced
1080p
1920
1080 *
16:9
progressive
23.976
1080p
1920
1080 *
16:9
progressive
24
1080p
1920
1080 *
16:9
progressive
29.97
HDTV
1080p
1920
1080 *
16:9
progressive
30
1080i
1920
1080 *
16:9
interlaced
29.97
1080i
1920
1080 *
16:9
interlaced
30
1080i
1920
1080 *
16:9
interlaced
25
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1080p
1920
1080 *
16:9
progressive
25
1035i
1920
1035(1) 1035(1) 1035(1)
16:9
interlaced
25
1035i
1920
16:9
interlaced
29.97
1035i
1920
16:9
interlaced
30
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
23.976
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
24
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
29.97
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
30
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
59.94
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
60
720p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
25
720p 576p(2)
1280
720
16:9
progressive
50
720
576
16:9
progressive
24
576p
720
576
16:9
progressive
25
576p 576p(2)
720
576
16:9
progressive
50
720
576
4:3
progressive
24
576p
720
576
4:3
progressive
25
576p SDTV 576i
720
576
4:3
progressive
50
720
576
16:9
interlaced
25
576i
720
576
4:3
interlaced
25 24(2), 25
576p
544, 480, 352
576
16:9, 4:3
progressive
576i
544, 480, 352
576
16:9, 4:3
interlaced
25
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480p
720
480
16:9, 4:3
progressive
23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.94, 60
35
480i
720
480
16:9, 4:3
interlaced
29.97, 30
480p
640
480
4:3
progressive
23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.94, 60
480i
640
480
4:3
interlaced
29.97, 30
480p
544, 480, 352
480
16:9, 4:3
progressive
23.976, 29.97
480i
544, 480, 352
480
16:9, 4:3
interlaced
29.97 24(2), 25
288p LDTV 240p
352
288
16:9, 4:3
progressive
352
240
16:9, 4:3
progressive
23.976, 29.97
Table 4: Standardized DVB formats (MPEG-2) of EBU/ETSI
(1)
To satisfy the MPEG-2 standard the format 1035i is actually to be encoded with 1056 lines. 21 lines are
black due to the MPEG standards while the MPEG decoder outputs only 1035 active lines.
(2)
These formats are defined only for contribution- and primary distribution applications.
Consider the complete overview of countries using DVB-T.
7.5 H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding)
The DVB formats with AVC screen resolution standardized by EBU (European Broadcasting Union) and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in these days are represented in tab. 5:
DVB formats (AVC screen resolution) vertical scan lines frame rate (Hz)
23.976, 24
format
horizontal pixels
aspect ratio
scan mode
H.264/AVC level
1080p
1080 *
16:9
progressive
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1920, 1440, 1280, 960
1080p
1920, 1440, 1280, 960
1080 *
16:9
progressive
25
1080i
1920, 1440, 1280, 960
1080 *
16:9
interlaced
25
1080i
1920, 1440, 1280, 960
1080 *
16:9
interlaced
29.97, 30
720p
1280, 960, 640
720
16:9
progressive
23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.94, 60
720p
1280, 960, 640
720
16:9
progressive
25, 50
576p
720
576
16:9, 4:3
progressive
50
576p
720, 544, 480, 352
576
16:9, 4:3
progressive
25
576i
720, 544, 480, 352
576
16:9, 4:3
interlaced
25
480p
720
480
16:9, 4:3
progressive
59.94, 60
480p
720, 640, 544, 480, 352
480
16:9, 4:3
progressive
23.976, 24, 29.97, 30
480i
720, 640, 544, 480, 352
480
16:9, 4:3
interlaced
29.97, 30
288p
352
288
4:3
progressive
25, 50
288i
352
288
4:3
interlaced
25
240p
352
240
4:3
progressive
23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.94, 60
240i
352
240
4:3
interlaced
29.97, 30
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Table 5: Standardized DVB formats (AVC) of EBU/ETSI
Consider the complete overview of countries using DVB-T.
7.6 ISDB (Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting)
At present, the standardized digital formats in Japan subdivided in SDTV and HDTV are represented in tab. 6:
ISDB formats1 horizontal pixels
1920
format
vertical scan lines

1080 *
aspect ratio
16:9
scan mode
frame rate2
1125i
interlaced
29.97 Hz
HDTV
1125i
1440
1080 *
16:9
interlaced
29.97 Hz
750p
1280
720
16:9
progressive
59.94 Hz
525p
720
480
16:9
progressive
59.94 Hz
525i
720
480
16:9
interlaced
29.97 Hz
525i
544
480
16:9
interlaced
29.97 Hz
SDTV
525i
480
480
16:9
interlaced
29.97 Hz
525i
720
480
4:3
interlaced
29.97 Hz
525i
544
480
4:3
interlaced
29.97 Hz
525i
480
480
4:3
interlaced
29.97 Hz
Tabelle 6: ARIB's standardized ISDB formats (Japan)
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Tab. 6 shows the ISDB formats if the screensize was not defined by the command
Sequence_Display_Extension. If the screensize is defined by Sequence_Display_Extension further formats with screen ratio 4:3 and different vertical heights and horizontal widths are possible.
2
The output of 24 fps film material is not explictly defined in the ARIB standard. Due to the control of the
Progressive_Frame flag and the R_F_F and T_F_F flags of the MPEG-2 video stream an original frame rate of 24 fps can be imposed.
Consider the complete overview of countries using ISDB-T.
8. Ultimate Comments
The frame rate of a motion picture film is 24 fps corresponding to 48 fields/s. On a NTSC DVD the MPEG-2 material is also usually encoded in 24 fps (48 fields/s). Normally, T_F_F and R_F_F flags are not used by PC software DVD players. These flags are ignored since they would make no sense in the progressive PC operation. Therefore, the frame rate of a usual motion picture film on NTSC DVD is 24 fps. But with MPEG-2 the frame rate or refresh rate always depends on coding. For this special topic refer to the MPEG/FPS section above. In order to avoid audio flutter during transmission the NTSC television is transferred in 29.97 fps (59.94 fields/s) or 23.976 fps respectively. For detailed information of the exact refresh rates refer to the explanations for the NTSC-Standard and the Telecining in the text above. The MPEG stream of PAL DVDs is encoded in 25 fps. Regarding the FILM and NTSC run time output of the "PAL-NTSC-FILM-Converter" it must be mentioned here that the run time of usual motion picture films on NTSC DVDs does not correspond to the "NTSC run time" but to the "FILM run time"! This circumstances apply to NTSC DVDs the MPEG stream of which is encoded as well as stored on the DVD in 24 fps. A motion picture film which runs e.g. 116 min. on a PAL DVD will not run 120 min. and 57 sec. on a NTSC DVD but 120 min. and 50 sec.
9. Examples
The following overview (tab. 3) shows some results of the test scores to clarify the statements which are listed above.
PAL version (DVD) run time [min:sec] "Ultimate Comments" 116:00 NTSC version (DVD) run time [min:sec] "Ultimate Comments" 120:50
American Psycho
UK version, RC2, Rated: BBFC HK version, RC3, Rated: 18, uncut, Entertainment in Video Unrated/Not Rated, uncut, Hong
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Example
(1999)
97:49
Kong Official DVD 101:53
Blade (1998)
German version, RC2, Rated: FSK US version, RC1, Rated: R, 18, uncut, BMG Video, Deluxe uncut, New Line Platinum Series Edition 120:05 115:17 German version, RC2, Rated: FSK US version, RC1, Rated: R, 18, uncut, Warner Home uncut, New Line Platinum Series Entertainment 116:42 112:01 UK version, RC2, Rated: BBFC 15, (uncut), Entertainment in Video 108:14 US version, RC1, Rated: R, (uncut), New Line Platinum Series 112:44
Blade II (2002)
Blade: Trinity (2004) Theatrical Version
US version, RC1, Rated: Blade: Trinity (2004) UK version, RC2, Rated: BBFC Unrated/Not Rated, uncut, New Extended Version/ 15, uncut, Entertainment in Video Line Platinum Series Unrated Version 117:16 "Extended Version" 122:10 "Unrated Version" German version, RC2, Rated: FSK US version, RC1, Rated: PG-13, Unbreakable (2000) 16, uncut, Touchstone Pictures uncut, Touchstone Pictures 102:15 106:31
Table 3: DVD run times in PAL and NTSC versions
The denotation "uncut" means that the PAL and NTSC versions are not cut in any way. There is no difference between the versions in each case. So, there is no scene which can only be seen in one version. Furthermore, there is no difference in intros or end credits.
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Part II
Digital Broadcasting
The World Moves to DTV
By 2010 about half of the world's major countries had converted to digital broadcasting. Digital TV uses a more efficient transmission technology allowing for improved picture and sound quality. In addition, digital signals provide more programming options through the use of multiple digital subchannels (channels of information within the basic broadcast signal).
Compared to analog signals, digital broadcast signals react differently to interference. Common problems with over-the-air analog television include ghosting of images (seeing multiple faint images at the same time; note photo), noise or "snow" because of a weak signal, etc. Changes in analog signal reception result from factors such as a poor or misdirected antenna and changing weather conditions. But even under these conditions an analog signal may still be viewable and you may still hear the sound. With digital television, the audio and video must be synchronized digitally, so reception of the digital signal must be very nearly complete. The nature of digital TV results in a perfect picture initially, until the receiving equipment starts picking up interference or the signal is too weak to decode.
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With poor reception some digital receivers will show a "blocky" video or a garbled picture with significant damage, other receivers may go directly from a perfect picture to no picture at all. This phenomenon is known as the digital cliff effect. The first country to make a complete switch to digital over-the-air (terrestrial) broadcasting was Luxembourg, in 2006. Shortly thereafter, the Netherlands made the switch. Finland, Andorra, Sweden and Switzerland followed in 2007. In June 2009, all major broadcast stations in the United States switched to DTV. We say "major" because some lower power TV stations were allowed to stay with the NTSC analog standard for a period of time. Some countries don't plan a complete analog-to-digital transition until around 2020. There are two basic international standards for digital broadcasting, the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) standard adopted by United States and Canada, and DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial) system used in most of the rest of the world. Although the ATSC approach has weaknesses, most notably the ability to hold up under mobile conditions, it includes important features such as 5.1-channel surround sound using the Dolby Digital AC-3 format. The reduced bandwidth requirements of lower-resolution images allow up to six standard-definition subchannels or datacasting channels within the 6 MHz TV channel. How these will be developed and used remains to be seen.
The table below summarizes the difference between the analog and digital broadcast systems. Standards Total Lines Active Lines 525 480-486 (maximum visible on the screen) Two channels (stereo) SDTV (Analog) 1125 1080 (maximum visible on the screen) 5.1 channels (surround sound) 1920 X 1080 HDTV (Digital)
Sound Max Resolution
720 X 486
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As you can see, the ATSC standard is capable of 16:9 images up to 1920 by 1080 pixels in size and resolution, which is more than six times the display resolution of the earlier analog standard. In addition, many different image sizes can be supported. These include:
Standard definition480i (interlaced), to maintain compatibility with existing NTSC sets Enhanced definition480p, (progressive), about the same quality as current DVDs High definition720p High definition1080i (the highest definition currently being broadcast) High definition1080p (only used by a few cable operators)
We'll illustrate the difference in clarity between SDTV and HDTV in Part Two of this module, and we'll explain surround sound and 5.1 audio in Module 42. It was thought that the move to digital and the "sudden" loss of all major NTSC television stations in the U.S. would be met with widespread viewer consternation. In fact, TV stations braced themselves for an avalanche of unhappy viewers demanding to know what happened to their TV stations. This did not happen for four reasons. First, TV stations had launched a major educational campaign about the switch that had lasted for months, second, most viewers were receiving the stations by cable or by satellite, which were not affected, third, for some time new TV sets had been equipped to handle ATSC signals, and, finally, the government went so far as to issue vouchers to help pay for set-top boxes to enable existing over-the-air NTSC receivers to convert to over-the-air ATSC signals. Compare the screen enlargements shown here that represent HDTV and the standard NTSC systems. When projected on a 16 x 9-foot screen and observed from normal viewing distance, the picture detail in good (1,080p) HDTV systems appears to equal or better that attained by projected 35mm motion picture film. The enlarged illustrations on the left show the relative pixel detail of SDTV and HDTV. (The illustrations assume a 40-inch TV screen.) SDTV produces an image with about 200,000 pixel (picture) points. HDTV increases that by a factor of about 10 to two million pixels.
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In the graph on the right, the taller the red bar, the sharper the picture. Note that the interlaced (i) and progressive (p) approaches to scanning result in a significant difference in apparent picture sharpness (measured in terms of discerned pixel points of detail). All other things being equal, the difference in perceived picture sharpness centers on the number of (visible) scanning lines, which here ranges from SDTV's 480 lines to HDTV's 1,080 lines. The although the 1080p system delivers the sharpest images, the approach is so technically demanding it can only be distributed by non-broadcast systems. However, it can be converted to film and projected in a theater without most patrons realizing they're seeing video.
We often make comparisons between video and film quality. But video and film are inherently different media, and the question of their relative "quality" (a word that can mean many things to many people) has been the subject of lively debate. Both sides claim their medium is superior.
When we compare film and video media in a broadcast application, the differences between video and film are based more on differences in their traditional production approaches than on inherent differences between the media.
We discuss the relative advantages of film and video and the differences between their quality and costs in more detail here.
Converting Wide-Screen Formats
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Three approaches are used:
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Production facilities make the conversion of 16:9 HDTV/DTV images to the standard 4:3 aspect ratio in the same way they convert wide-screen films to NTSC television. (We'll cover inset conversion approaches later.)
First, is when the conversion involves cutting off the sides of 16:9 image to a narrower 4:3 size. We refer to this as an edge crop or 4:3 center cut. If we shoot the original HDTV/DTV (or wide-screen film) with the narrower 4:3 cutoff area in mind, losing the information at the sides of the picture should not be an issue. (This is the area on each side of the red box in the photo below, which, as noted, is referred to as a center-cut of the full 16:9 raster.) We refer to the procedure of keeping essential subject matter out of the cutoff areas as shoot-and-protect. Second, the entire production can go through a process called pan-and-scan. In this case a technician reviews every scene and programs a computer-controlled imaging device to electronically pan the 4:3 window back and forth over the larger, wide-screen format. The red arrows suggest this panning movement. In this picture, cutting off the sides would not be an issue; but what if you had the two parrots talking (??) to each other from the far sides of the screen? Finally, if the full HDTV/DTV frame contains important visual information (as in the case of written material extending to the edges of the screen), panning-and-scanning will not work. In this case, a letterbox approach can be used, as shown here. But you can see the problem. The result is blank areas at the top and bottom of the frame. Often, we reserve the letterbox approach for the opening titles and closing credits of a production, and panand-scan is used for the remainder. Since some directors feel that pan-and-scan introduces pans that are artificial and not motivated by the action (nor the composition they originally intended). They may try to insist their work be displayed using letterbox conversion. Originally, producers feared that audiences would object to the black areas at the top and bottom of the letterbox frame. (More than one person who rented a film (video) in the letterbox format brought it back to the video store complaining that something was wrong with the tape.) Today, however, viewers accept this format. There is another way of handling the 16:9 to 4:3 aspect ratio difference -- especially for titles and credits. You've probably seen the opening or closing of a film on television horizontally "squeezed" in. We refer to this optical technique as anamorphic conversion.
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The effect is especially noticeable when people are part of the scene -- people who, as a result, suddenly become rather thin. (Not that all actors would complain!) Compare the two images above. Note how the bird in the squeezed 4:3 ratio on the right seems to be thinner than the bird on the left. Another way of visualizing the major SDTV-to-HDTV and HDTV-to-SDTV conversion approaches is illustrated here.
SDTV to HDTV In-Set Conversion Approaches
HDTV receivers can also (roughly speaking) convert SDTV (4:3) and HDTV (16:9) aspect ratios. Manufacturers build three options into many HDTV receivers:
Zoom - Proportionally expands SDTV horizontally and vertically to fill the 16:9 screen. This eliminates the unused blank areas we would normally see at the edges of the picture, but it also crops off some of the SDTV picture in the process. Stretch - Expands SDTV horizontally to fill the 16:9 screen. This makes objects a bit wider than they would normally be. Combined zoom/stretch - A hybrid of the zoom and stretch modes that minimizes the cropping effect of the zoom mode and the image distortion of the stretch mode.
Clearly, all these approaches leave something to be desired, so today savvy producers originate productions in the 16:9 wide-screen format using the "shoot-and-protect" approach we've discussed.
definition television
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search
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This article needs additional citations for verification.

Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2009)
High-definition television (or HDTV, or just HD) refers to video having resolution substantially higher than traditional television systems (standard-definition TV, or SDTV, or SD). HD has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SD. Early HDTV broadcasting used analog techniques, but today HDTV is digitally broadcast using video compression.
Projection screen in a home theater, displaying an HDTV image.
Contents
[hide]
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1 History of high-definition television o 1.1 Analog systems o 1.2 Rise of digital compression o 1.3 Demise of analog HD systems 2 Inaugural HDTV broadcast in the United States 3 European HDTV broadcasts 4 Notation o 4.1 High-definition display resolutions o 4.2 Standard frame or field rates o 4.3 Types of media 5 Contemporary systems 6 Recording and compression 7 TV resolution 8 See also 9 Notes
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10 References
[edit] History of high-definition television

Further information: Analog high-definition television system
The term high definition once described a series of television systems originating from the late 1930s; however, these systems were only high definition when compared to earlier systems that were based on mechanical systems with as few as 30 lines of resolution. The British high definition TV service started trials in August 1936 and a regular service in November 1936 using both the (mechanical) Baird 240 line and (electronic) Marconi-EMI 405 line (377i) systems. The Baird system was discontinued in February 1937. In 1938 France followed with their own 441 line system, variants of which were also used by a number of other countries. The US NTSC system joined in 1941. In 1949 France introduced an even higher resolution standard at 819 lines (768i), a system that would be high definition even by today's standards, but it was monochrome only. All of these systems used interlacing and a 4:3 aspect ratio except the 240 line system which was progressive (actually described at the time by the technically correct term 'sequential') and the 405 line system which started as 5:4 and later changed to 4:3. The 405 line system adopted the (at that time) revolutionary idea of interlaced scanning to overcome the flicker problem of the 240 line with its 25 Hz frame rate. The 240 line system could have doubled its frame rate but this would have meant that the transmitted signal would have doubled in bandwidth, an unacceptable option. Color broadcasts started at similarly higher resolutions, first with the US NTSC color system in 1953, which was compatible with the earlier B&W systems and therefore had the same 525 lines (480i) of resolution. European standards did not follow until the 1960s, when the PAL and SECAM colour systems were added to the monochrome 625 line (576i) broadcasts. Since the formal adoption of Digital Video Broadcasting's (DVB) widescreen HDTV transmission modes in the early 2000s the 525-line NTSC (and PAL-M) systems as well as the European 625-line PAL and SECAM systems are now regarded as standard definition television systems. In Australia, the 625-line digital progressive system (with 576 active lines) is officially recognized as high definition.[1]
[edit] Analog systems

In 1949, France started its transmissions with an 819 lines system (768i). It was monochrome only, it was used only on VHF for the first French TV channel, and it was discontinued in 1985. In 1958, the Soviet Union developed ransformator (Russian: , Transformer), the first high-resolution (definition) television system capable of producing an image composed of 1,125 lines of resolution aimed at providing teleconferencing for military command. It was a research project and the system was never deployed in the military or broadcasting.[2]
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In 1969, the Japanese state broadcaster NHK first developed consumer high-definition television with a 5:3 aspect ratio, a rather wider screen format than the usual 4:3 standard.[3] The system, known as Hi-Vision or MUSE after its Multiple sub-Nyquist sampling encoding for encoding the signal, required about twice the bandwidth of the existing NTSC system but provided about four times the resolution (1080i/1125 lines). Satellite test broadcasts started in 1989, with regular testing starting in 1991 and regular broadcasting of BS-9ch commenced on 25 November 1994, which featured commercial and NHK programming. In 1981, the MUSE system was demonstrated for the first time in the United States, using the same 5:3 aspect ratio as the Japanese system.[4] Upon visiting a demonstration of MUSE in Washington, US President Ronald Reagan was most impressed and officially declared it "a matter of national interest" to introduce HDTV to the USA.[5] Several systems were proposed as the new standard for the USA, including the Japanese MUSE system, but all were rejected by the FCC because of their higher bandwidth requirements. At this time, the number of television channels was growing rapidly and bandwidth was already a problem. A new standard had to be more efficient, needing less bandwidth for HDTV than the existing NTSC.
[edit] Rise of digital compression

Since 1972, International Telecommunication Union's radio telecommunications sector (ITU-R) has been working on creating a global recommendation for Analogue HDTV. These recommendations however did not fit in the broadcasting bands which could reach home users. The standardization of MPEG-1 in 1993 also led to the acceptance of recommendations ITU-R BT.709[6]. In anticipation of these standards the DVB organisation was formed, an alliance of broadcasters, consumer electronics manufacturers and regulatory bodies. The DVB develops and agrees on specifications which are formally standardised by ETSI[7]. DVB created first the standard for DVB-S digital satellite TV, DVB-C digital cable TV and DVB-T digital terrestrial TV. These broadcasting systems can be used for both SDTV and HDTV. In the USA the Grand Alliance proposed ATSC as the new standard for SDTV and HDTV. Both ATSC and DVB were based on the MPEG-2 standard. The DVB-S2 standard is based on the newer and more efficient H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression standards. Common for all DVB standards is the use of highly efficient modulation techniques for further reducing bandwidth, and foremost for reducing receiver-hardware and antenna requirements. In 1983, the International Telecommunication Union's radio telecommunications sector (ITU-R) set up a working party (IWP11/6) with the aim of setting a single international HDTV standard. One of the thornier issues concerned a suitable frame/field refresh rate, the world already having split into two camps, 25/50Hz and 30/60Hz, related by reasons of picture stability to the frequency of their main electrical supplies. The IWP11/6 working party considered many views and through the 1980s served to encourage development in a number of video digital processing areas, not least conversion between the two
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main frame/field rates using motion vectors, which led to further developments in other areas. While a comprehensive HDTV standard was not in the end established, agreement on the aspect ratio was achieved. Initially the existing 5:3 aspect ratio had been the main candidate but, due to the influence of widescreen cinema, the aspect ratio 16:9 (1.78) eventually emerged as being a reasonable compromise between 5:3 (1.67) and the common 1.85 widescreen cinema format. (Bob Morris explained that the 16:9 ratio was chosen as being the geometric mean of 4:3, Academy ratio, and 2.4:1, the widest cinema format in common use, in order to minimize wasted screen space when displaying content with a variety of aspect ratios.[8]) An aspect ratio of 16:9 was duly agreed at the first meeting of the IWP11/6 working party at the BBC's Research and Development establishment in Kingswood Warren. The resulting ITU-R Recommendation ITU-R BT.709-2 ("Rec. 709") includes the 16:9 aspect ratio, a specified colorimetry, and the scan modes 1080i (1,080 actively interlaced lines of resolution) and 1080p (1,080 progressively scanned lines). The current Freeview HD trials use MBAFF, which contains both progressive and interlaced content in the same encoding. It also includes the alternative 14401152 HDMAC scan format. (According to some reports, a mooted 750-ine (720p) format (720 progressively scanned lines) was viewed by some at the ITU as an enhanced television format rather than a true HDTV format,[9] and so was not included, although 19201080i and 1280720p systems for a range of frame and field rates were defined by several US SMPTE standards.)
[edit] Demise of analog HD systems

Even this limited standardization of HDTV did not lead to its adoption, principally for technical and economic reasons. Early HDTV commercial experiments such as NHK's MUSE required over four times the bandwidth of a standard-definition broadcast, and despite efforts made to reduce it to about twice that of SDTV, it was still only distributable by satellite with one channel shared on a daily basis between seven broadcasters. In addition, recording and reproducing an HDTV signal was a significant technical challenge in the early years of HDTV. Japan remained the only country with successful public broadcast analog HDTV. Digital HDTV broadcasting started in 2000 in Japan, and the analog service ended in the early hours of 1 October 2007. In Europe, analog 1,250-line HD-MAC test broadcasts were made in the early 1990s, but did not lead to any established public broadcast service.
[edit] Inaugural HDTV broadcast in the United States
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HDTV technology was introduced in the United States in the 1990s by the Digital HDTV Grand Alliance, a group of television companies and MIT.[10][11] Field testing of HDTV at 199 sites in the United States was completed August 14, 1994.[12] The first public HDTV broadcast in the United States occurred on July 23, 1996 when the Raleigh, North Carolina television station WRAL-HD began broadcasting from the existing tower of WRAL-TV south-east of Raleigh,
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winning a race to be first with the HD Model Station in Washington, D.C., which began broadcasting July 31, 1996, which had the calls WHD-TV and was based out of the facilities of NBC owned and operated station WRC-TV.[13][14][15] The American Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) HDTV system had its public launch on October 29, 1998, during the live coverage of astronaut John Glenn's return mission to space on board the Space Shuttle Discovery.[16] The signal was transmitted coast-to-coast, and was seen by the public in science centers, and other public theaters specially equipped to receive and display the broadcast.[16][17]
[edit] European HDTV broadcasts
Although HDTV broadcasts had been demonstrated in Europe since the early 1990s, the first regular broadcasts started on January 1, 2004 when the Belgian company Euro1080 launched the HD1 channel with the traditional Vienna New Year's Concert. Test transmissions had been active since the IBC exhibition in September 2003, but the New Year's Day broadcast marked the official start of the HD1 channel, and the start of HDTV in Europe.[18] Euro1080, a division of the Belgian TV services company Alfacam, broadcast HDTV channels to break the pan-European stalemate of "no HD broadcasts mean no HD TVs bought means no HD broadcasts..." and kick-start HDTV interest in Europe.[19] The HD1 channel was initially free-to-air and mainly comprised sporting, dramatic, musical and other cultural events broadcast with a multi-lingual soundtrack on a rolling schedule of 4 or 5 hours per day. These first European HDTV broadcasts used the 1080i format with MPEG-2 compression on a DVB-S signal from SES Astra's 1H satellite at Europe's main DTH Astra 19.2E position. Euro1080 transmissions later changed to MPEG-4/AVC compression on a DVB-S2 signal in line with subsequent broadcast channels in Europe. In the following six years, the number of HD channels broadcasting to Europe has grown considerably, particularly from the pay-TV broadcasters. At the end of 2009, there were 114 HD channels broadcasting from Astra satellites.[20]
European HD Channels via Astra by Country (end 2009) UK Sweden Italy Netherlands Albania 39 16 14 8 7 Poland Norway Portugal Belgium Bulgaria 36 16 11 8 5 France Finland Spain 19 16 9 Germany Denmark Hungary Slovakia Pan-European 17 15 9 7
Czech Republic 8 Austria 2
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The number of households able to view HD channels has also increased. According to SES Astra, at the year-end 2009 there were 6 million households receiving HD channels via Astra satellites, and it is expected that by 2013 there will be 24.7 million households in Europe watching HD channels via satellite.
European HD-via-Astra Homes by Country/Region (end 2009) UK France Benelux Scandinavia Spain 2,880,000 820,000 27,000 108,000 98,000 Germany Austria Czech Republic Poland 1,300,000 180,000 60,000 300,000
In December 2009 the UK became the first European country to deploy high definition content on digital terrestrial television (branded as Freeview) using the new DVB-T2 transmission standard as specified in the Digital TV Group (DTG) D-Book. The Freeview HD service contains 3 HD channels and is now rolling out region by region across the UK in accordance with the digital switchover process.
Notation
HDTV broadcast systems are identified with three major parameters:
Frame size in pixels is defined as number of horizontal pixels number of vertical pixels, for example 1280 720 or 1920 1080. Often the number of horizontal pixels is implied from context and is omitted, as in the case of 720p and 1080p. Scanning system is identified with the letter P for progressive scanning or I for interlaced scanning. Frame rate is identified as number of video frames per second. For interlaced systems an alternative form of specifying number of fields per second is often used. [citation needed]
If all three parameters are used, they are specified in the following form: [frame size][scanning system][frame or field rate] or [frame size]/[frame or field rate][scanning system]. [citation needed] Often, frame size or frame rate can be dropped if its value is implied from context. In this case the remaining numeric parameter is specified first, followed by the scanning system. For example, 19201080p25 identifies progressive scanning format with 25 frames per second, each frame being 1,920 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels high. The 1080i25 or 1080i50 notation identifies interlaced scanning format with 25 frames (50 fields) per second, each frame being
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1,920 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels high. [citation needed] The 1080i30 or 1080i60 notation identifies interlaced scanning format with 30 frames (60 fields) per second, each frame being 1,920 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels high. [citation needed] The 720p60 notation identifies progressive scanning format with 60 frames per second, each frame being 720 pixels high; 1,280 pixels horizontally are implied. 50Hz systems allow for only three scanning rates: 25i, 25p and 50p. 60Hz systems operate with much wider set of frame rates: 23.976p, 24p, 29.97i/59.94i, 29.97p, 30p, 59.94p and 60p. In the days of standard definition television, the fractional rates were often rounded up to whole numbers, e.g. 23.976p was often called 24p, or 59.94i was often called 60i. High definition television allows using both fractional and whole rates, therefore strict usage of notation is required. Nevertheless, 29.97i/59.94i is almost universally called 60i, likewise 23.976p is called 24p. [citation needed] For commercial naming of a product, the frame rate is often dropped and is implied from context (e.g., a 1080i television set). A frame rate can also be specified without a resolution. For example, 24p means 24 progressive scan frames per second, and 50i means 25 interlaced frames per second. [citation needed] One aspect of the HDTV that hasn't received a naming standard is color. Until recently, the color of each pixel was regulated by three 8-bit color values, each representing the level of red, blue, and green which defined a pixel color. Together the 24 total bits defining color yielded just under 17 million possible pixel colors. Recently, some manufacturers have designed systems that can employ 10 bits for each color (30 bits total) which provides for a palette of 1 billion colors. They contend that this provides a much richer picture. Until the naming of this criterion is standardized, consumers will have to do research to ensure that a piece of equipment supports this feature. Most HDTV systems support resolutions and frame rates defined either in the ATSC table 3, or in EBU specification. The most common are noted below.
High-definition display resolutions

Video format supported Native resolution (WH) Pixels Aspect ratio (W:H) Description Actual Advertised Image (Mpixel) Pixel Typically a PC resolution (XGA); also a native resolution on many entry-level plasma displays with non-square pixels.
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720p 1280x720
1024768 XGA
786,432
0.8
16:9
4:3
1280720
921,600
0.9
16:9
1:1
Standard HDTV resolution and a typical PC resolution (WXGA), frequently used by video projectors; also used for 750-line video, as defined in SMPTE 296M, ATSC A/53, ITU-R BT.1543.
1366768 WXGA
1,049,088 1.0
683:384 A typical PC resolution (WXGA); 1:1 (approx. also used by many HD ready TV approx. 16:9) displays based on LCD technology. Standard HDTV resolution, used by Full HD and HD ready 1080p TV displays such as high-end LCD, Plasma and rear projection TVs, and a typical PC resolution (lower than WUXGA); also used for 1125line video, as defined in SMPTE 274M, ATSC A/53, ITU-R BT.709;
1080p/1080i 19201080 19201080
2,073,600 2.1
16:9
1:1
Video Screen format resolution supported (WH)
Pixels
Aspect ratio (W:H) Description
Advertised Actual Image Pixel (Mpixel) Used for 750-line video with raster 1:1 artifact/overscan compensation, as defined in SMPTE 296M. Used for 1125-line video with faster 1:1 artifact/overscan compensation, as defined in SMPTE 274M. Used for anamorphic 1125-line video in the HDCAM and HDV formats introduced by 4:3 Sony and defined (also as a luminance subsampling matrix) in SMPTE D11.
1780956 720p Clean 1780956 Aperture 18881062 1080p Clean 19201080 aperture
876,096
0.9
16:9
2,001,280 2.0
16:9
1080i 14401080 1,555,200 1.6 19201080 HDCAM/HDV
16:9
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Standard frame or field rates

23.976 Hz (film-looking frame rate compatible with NTSC clock speed standards) 24 Hz (international film and ATSC high definition material) 25 Hz (PAL, SECAM film, standard definition, and high definition material) 29.97 Hz (NTSC standard definition material) 50 Hz (PAL & SECAM high definition material)) 59.94 Hz (ATSC high definition material) 60 Hz (ATSC high definition material)
A comparison of multiple TV resolution standards as if it were viewed on a fixed-pixel display at full 1080p resolution. View at full size for proper comparison.
At a minimum, HDTV has twice the linear resolution of standard-definition television (SDTV), thus showing greater detail than either analog television or regular DVD. The technical standards for broadcasting HDTV also handle the 16:9 aspect ratio images without using letterboxing or anamorphic stretching, thus increasing the effective image resolution. The optimum format for a broadcast depends upon the type of videographic recording medium used and the image's characteristics. The field and frame rate should match the source and the resolution. A very high resolution source may require more bandwidth than available in order to be transmitted without loss of fidelity. The lossy compression that is used in all digital HDTV storage and transmission systems will distort the received picture, when compared to the uncompressed source. There is a wide spread confusion of using terms like PAL or SECAM or NTSC relating to HD material. PAL, SECM, NTSC are only standard definition standards, not HD. There is no specific technical reason to keep 25Hz as HD frame rate in a former PAL country.
Types of media
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Standard 35 mm photographic film used for cinema projection has higher resolution than HDTV systems, and is exposed and projected at a rate of 24 frames per second. To be shown on
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standard television, in PAL-system countries, cinema film is scanned at the TV rate of 25 frames per second, causing an acceleration of 4.1 percent, which is generally considered acceptable. In NTSC-system countries, the TV scan rate of 30 frames per second would cause a perceptible acceleration if the same were attempted, and the necessary correction is performed by a technique called 3:2 pull-down: over each successive pair of film frames, one is held for three video fields (1/20 of a second) and the next is held for two video fields (1/30 of a second), giving a total time for the two frames of 1/12 of a second and thus achieving the correct average film frame rate.
See also: Telecine
Non-cinematic HDTV video recordings intended for broadcast are typically recorded either in 720p or 1080i format as determined by the broadcaster. 720p is commonly used for Internet distribution of high-definition video, because most computer monitors operate in progressivescan mode. 720p also imposes less strenuous storage and decoding requirements compared to both 1080i and 1080p. 1080p is usually used for Blu-ray Disc.
Contemporary systems
Main article: Large-screen television technology
Components of a typical satellite HDTV system: 1. HDTV Monitor 2. HD satellite receiver 3. Standard satellite dish 4. HDMI cable, DVI-D and audio cables, or audio and component video cables
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Besides an HD-ready television set, other equipment may be needed to view HD television. In the US, Cable-ready TV sets can display HD content without using an external box. They have a QAM tuner built-in and/or a card slot for inserting a CableCARD.[21]
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High-definition image sources include terrestrial broadcast, direct broadcast satellite, digital cable, IPTV, the high definition Blu-ray video disc (BD), internet downloads, the Blu-ray disc compatible Sony PlayStation 3 video game console (PS3), and the Microsoft Xbox 360 video game console.
Recording and compression
Main article: High-definition pre-recorded media and compression
HDTV can be recorded to D-VHS (Digital-VHS or Data-VHS), W-VHS (analog only), to an HDTV-capable digital video recorder (for example DirecTV's high-definition Digital video recorder, Sky HD's set-top box, Dish Network's VIP 622 or VIP 722 high-definition Digital video recorder receivers, or TiVo's Series 3 or HD recorders), or an HDTV-ready HTPC. Some cable boxes are capable of receiving or recording two or more broadcasts at a time in HDTV format, and HDTV programming, some free, some for a fee, can be played back with the cable company's on-demand feature. The massive amount of data storage required to archive uncompressed streams meant that inexpensive uncompressed storage options were not available in the consumer market until recently. In 2008 the Hauppauge 1212 Personal Video Recorder was introduced. This device accepts HD content through component video inputs and stores the content in an uncompressed MPEG transport stream (.ts) file or Blu-ray format .m2ts file on the hard drive or DVD burner of a computer connected to the PVR through a USB 2.0 interface. Realtime MPEG-2 compression of an uncompressed digital HDTV signal is prohibitively expensive for the consumer market at this time, but should become inexpensive within several years (although this is more relevant for consumer HD camcorders than recording HDTV). Analog tape recorders with bandwidth capable of recording analog HD signals such as W-VHS recorders are no longer produced for the consumer market and are both expensive and scarce in the secondary market. In the United States, as part of the FCC's plug and play agreement, cable companies are required to provide customers who rent HD set-top boxes with a set-top box with "functional" Firewire (IEEE 1394) upon request. None of the direct broadcast satellite providers have offered this feature on any of their supported boxes, but some cable TV companies have. As of July 2004, boxes are not included in the FCC mandate. This content is protected by encryption known as 5C.[22] This encryption can prevent duplication of content or simply limit the number of copies permitted, thus effectively denying most if not all fair use of the content.
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TV resolution
Digital video resolutions

Rate (Hz) Usage Definiti Exampl on Interlac Progressi ed ve es (lines) (fields) (frames) 240; 288 (SIF)
Designation
Low; MP@LL
LDTV, VCD
24, 30; 25
Standard; MP@ML
480 (NTSC, SDTV, PAL-M) SVCD, DVD, 576 DV (PAL, SECAM) 480; 576
60
24, 30
50
25
Enhanced
EDTV
60; 50
High; MP@HL
HDTV, 720 Blu-ray Disc, HD DVD, 1080 HDV
24, 30, 60; 25, 50 50, 60 24, 30; 25
This table illustrates total horizontal and vertical pixel resolution via box size. It does not accurately reflect the screen or pixel shape (aspect ratio) of these formats, which is either 4:3, or 16:9.
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World Television Signal Guide

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World Television Signal Guide

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WORLD TELEVISION SIGNAL GUIDE

The table below lists broadcast standards by country.

Television Standards by Country

Why Do Different TV Standards Exist?

TV Picture Format/Colour System Combinations

SECAM 4:3 or 16:9 D-MAC 16:9 PAL 16:9 MUSE

4.25/4.40MHz 625 N/A 625 4.43MHz 1125 Unknown

The Relative Merits of TV Systems

Broadcasting System Details

+5.5MHz Neg +5.5MHz Pos +6.5MHz Neg +11MHz Neg

+5.5MHz Pos +5.5MHz Neg +5.5MHz Neg +6.0MHz Neg

625 625 625

UHF UHF UHF

+6.5MHz Neg +6.5MHz Neg +6.5MHz Pos

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

30 (29.97) 525 25 625

VHF/UHF +4.5MHz Neg VHF/UHF +4.5MHz Neg

Additional TV systems used solely in Video

29.97/59.94 525 NTSC

Pseudo-PAL 29.97/59.94 525 PAL Pseudo-NTSC 25/50 625 NTSC

Video Formats - Availability by TV System

Comparing Video Tape Lengths

Building Bridges Between The Standards

Multi Standard Equipment

The Basic Approach Coping with Movement Scanline Artifacts

The Basic Approach

Coping With Movement

The Fundamental Basis SDTV HDTV

The Fundamental Basis

vertical scan lines

Table 3: Standardized ATSC formats (USA)

Consider the complete overview of countries using ATSC.

7.4 DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting)

vertical scan lines

frame rate (Hz)

1035(1) 1035(1) 1035(1)

576p SDTV 576i

544, 480, 352

544, 480, 352

23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.94, 60

23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.94, 60

544, 480, 352

544, 480, 352

288p LDTV 240p

Table 4: Standardized DVB formats (MPEG-2) of EBU/ETSI

Consider the complete overview of countries using DVB-T.

7.5 H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding)

1920, 1440, 1280, 960

1920, 1440, 1280, 960

1920, 1440, 1280, 960

1920, 1440, 1280, 960

1280, 960, 640

23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.94, 60

1280, 960, 640

720, 544, 480, 352

720, 544, 480, 352

720, 640, 544, 480, 352

23.976, 24, 29.97, 30

720, 640, 544, 480, 352

23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.94, 60

Table 5: Standardized DVB formats (AVC) of EBU/ETSI

Consider the complete overview of countries using DVB-T.

7.6 ISDB (Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting)